Welcome to The Illinois Numerical Relativity Visualization Primer

Eric Yu^1,2, Shreyas Jammi^1,2, Mit Kotak^1,2, Antonios Tsokaros^1,2,3, Milton Ruiz⁴, and Stuart L. Shapiro^1,2

Abstract

Over the past several decades the advent of new algorithms and new computers made possible numerous advances in computational physics, including numerical relativity, the computational study of Einstein’s equations of general relativity. Full 3+1-dimensional simulations of black holes and neutron stars that could include magnetic fields and detailed microphysics has become possible, and together with them, the need to analyze complicated large sets of data. Visualizing such datasets is important in order to better understand the problem at hand, as well as to efficiently communicate cutting-edge research to a larger audience. One open source software package that has emerged as a leader in supercomputing visualization, especially in the field of numerical relativity, is VisIt. This document describes techniques developed in the Relativity Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the past couple of decades to visualize numerical relativity simulations using the VisIt software. This guide is meant to be used as a resource for implementing visualizations using VisIt for numerical relativity and for further improving the visualization efforts of similar computationally intensive studies.

Keywords: VisIT; Visualization; Numerical Relativity

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